A Common Human Ground

Universality and Particularity in a Multicultural World

Claes G. Ryn

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780826222039
  9780826214942
• eBook ISBN:
  9780826264541
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

A great challenge of the twenty-first century is the danger of conflict between persons, peoples, and cultures, among and within societies. In A Common Human Ground, Claes Ryn explores the nature of this problem and sets forth a theory about what is necessary for peaceful relations to be possible.

Many in the Western world trust in "democracy," "capitalism," "liberal tolerance," "scientific progress," or "general enlightenment" to handle this problem. Although each of these, properly defined, may contribute toward alleviating disputes, Ryn argues that the problem is much more complex and demanding than is usually recognized. He reasons that, most fundamentally, good relations among individuals and nations have moral and cultural preconditions.

What can predispose them to mutual respect and peace? One Western philosophical tradition, for which Plato set the pattern, maintains that the only way to genuine unity is for historical diversity to yield to universality. The implication of this view for a multicultural world would be a peace that requires that cultural distinctiveness be effaced as far as possible and replaced with a universal culture. A very different Western philosophical tradition denies the existence of universality altogether. It is represented today by postmodernist multiculturalism—a view that leaves unanswered the question as to how conflict between diverse groups might be averted.

Ryn questions both of these traditions, arguing for the potential union of universality and particularity. He contends that the two need not be enemies, but in fact need each other. Cultivating individual and national particularities is potentially compatible with strengthening and enriching our common humanity. This volume embraces the notion of universality, while at the same time historicizing it.

Using wide-ranging examples, Ryn presents a firmly sustained and systematic argument centering on this central issue. His approach is interdisciplinary, discussing not only political ideas, but also fiction, drama, and other arts. Scholarly and philosophical, but not specialized, this book will appeal to general readers as well as intellectuals.

CHAPTER ONE

Peace as the Union of Universality and Particularity

Probably the greatest challenge facing mankind in the twenty-first century is the danger of conflict between peoples and cultures. There is an urgent need to explore in depth possibilities for minimizing tensions and to undertake efforts to reduce them. Horrendous consequences can result from superficiality, carelessness, and naïveté in defining the dangers and from delay in trying to lessen them. Yet the all-too-human desire to avoid painful self-scrutiny and reorientation of action makes human beings indulge a seemingly unlimited capacity for wishful thinking. Many in the West and elsewhere trust in scientific progress and general enlightenment to reduce the danger of conflict, but we need only look to the century preceding this one—the most murderous and inhumane in the history of mankind—to recognize that the spread of science and allegedly sophisticated modern ideas does not reduce the self-absorption or belligerence of human beings. It only provides them with new means of asserting their will. Others in the West trust in political and economic schemes to alleviate tensions, “democracy” and “free markets” being the two most popular at the moment. These prescriptions for how to promote good relations between peoples give short shrift to a subject that may in fact be far more important, one that requires greater depth and subtlety of mind and that is also not fashionable: the moral and cultural preconditions of peace. Whatever the importance of other factors, attempts to avoid conflict among peoples and individuals are not likely to be successful without a certain quality of human will and imagination. That this subject is receiving so much less attention than proposals for introducing technology and manipulating political and economic institutions is a sign that our societies are not now well equipped to deal with the most pressing problem of the new century.

We may state the question before us in the language of multiculturalism: Will it be possible for culturally diverse peoples and individuals to live peacefully together? Cultural diversity there has always been, but today new forms of communication and greater opportunities of migration are bringing people of very different backgrounds into closer and more frequent contact. This shrinking of the world has given great urgency to finding sources of accommodation, harmony, and tolerance. What are the possible grounds upon which diverse peoples and individuals might coexist in some harmony? That topic will be investigated here, with emphasis on the moral and cultural dimension of the question.

Those who dominate the debate on multiculturalism in the West have little or no interest in considering whether human experience might contain moral or aesthetical elements that transcend the distinctiveness of particular groups and societies and that might constitute a bond of shared humanity. These intellectuals simply deny the existence of universality. They espouse either the typical modern “liberal” view that all values are ultimately subjective and relative or the more radical form of antiuniversalism that is postmodernist “historicism.” For these people, peaceful relations among peoples and individuals could stem only from tolerance and clever management of differences, not from a common core of humanity.

To address the central issue we must establish a wider philosophical and historical context than the one provided by the current debate about multiculturalism. A broader exposure to what lies within the human range gives us not only more examples of the diversity of mankind but indications of substantial transhistorical and transcultural commonalities. Attending to a greater body of evidence than is typically done today reveals persistent moral and cultural patterns suggestive of a unity of human experience. Certain attitudes and forms of life found in different parts of the globe bespeak the existence of a more than subjective and time-bound apprehension of the self and the world. Discernible amidst the diversity of human tastes and preferences is a fundamental confluence of moral and aesthetical sensibility. This confluence is visible not only in mankind’s strictly religious traditions but in the moral and cultural life more generally. There have been recurring and systematic efforts over the centuries and across cultural boundaries to constrain the least-admirable traits of humanity and to promote a higher potential of life, to foster characteristics seen as being the best and noblest as well as a source of social cohesion and happiness. As a label for the endeavor to cultivate what is highest in man we might adopt the old word humanism. Since that word has no single definition, the following discussion will have to make clearer how it is used here.

Whether or in what sense multicultural diversity can be tempered and harmonized by a genuinely common human element depends on the answer to a fundamental question that has occupied and divided philosophers down the centuries. The question concerns the relationship between universality and particularity, the two pervasive elements of experience that in their apparent coexistence and tension constitute human life. Many terms have been used to refer to different aspects of the paradox of existence: unity and diversity, rest and motion, order and disorder, permanence and impermanence, harmony and disharmony, sameness and otherness—to name a few.

Although in direct, concrete experience the two dimensions are inseparable, philosophers have been prone to discount the ultimate significance of the one dimension and attribute reality only to the other. This was the case with Plato, as he is usually read, who posited a transcendent sphere of changeless forms, extolling a One opposed to all diversity and movement. For Plato, individual phenomena, the Many, were a part of the flux and had no meaning of their own; man should try as far as possible to escape from whatever is particular and changing to what is universal and unchanging. Universality—whose different forms were the good, the true, and the beautiful—was ahistorical and was threatened and obscured by the historical flux. Today, at the other extreme, postmodernists, represented in America by Richard Rorty, deny the existence of enduring standards of goodness, truth, and beauty. They recognize only historical particularity, contingency, and subjectivity, the element of existence that Plato associated with meaninglessness. Rejecting the notion of higher order or meaning, postmodernists celebrate diversity and advocate tolerance for differences among individuals and groups. They recognize no common human core.

These contrasting ways of thinking exemplify what Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), the American literary scholar and cultural thinker, calls “metaphysics of the One” and “metaphysics of the Many.” The two philosophical orientations discount, disparage, or disregard one of the dimensions of life, either the One or the Many. They are both “metaphysical” in the sense that they are not content to base their view of reality on the facts of immediate experience but are selective in considering the evidence. Each of the two orientations distorts even the element that most attracts its interest, for it attributes to that element a univocal character that life itself does not give. Babbitt’s view is that “life does not give here an element of oneness and there an element of change. It gives a oneness that is always changing. The oneness and the change are inseparable.”¹

How we regard the relationship between universality and particularity directly affects how we think about humanism and multiculturalism. Stark consequences result from assuming that universality and particularity have little or nothing in common or that one or the other does not really exist. If humanism is a moral and cultural proclivity to respect and promote the higher potential of particular human beings, then it would seem to be badly served by a philosophy that belittles particularity and attaches no importance to human individuality as such. If, as in Platonic philosophy, only pure universality has value, distinctive traits of personality are of no interest, are even detrimental to the higher life. The standard for elevating existence is a changeless, unitary norm above all individuality, and man’s purpose is to imitate it. Freedom and diversity introduce distractions, complications that should be limited and minimized. What is needed is not room for improvisation but conformity to the preexisting norm. Humanism framed on such a basis, if indeed it can be called humanism at all, detaches itself from concrete, historical life. It becomes strongly disinclined to accommodate human individuality. To people who see potential value in personal uniqueness as such and in the sometimes unexpected opportunities of life, this kind of universalistic humanism must appear cold, inflexible, unimaginative, or distant. In the West, universalism of this kind comes in many forms, including Jacobin rights of man, neo-Thomist moral rationalism, and ahistorical natural right thinking of the type advocated by Leo Strauss. Among religious thinkers who emphasize the vast distance between the concrete, immanent world and the divine ground of being are the theologian Karl Barth, with his notion of God as “wholly other,” and the intellectual historian Eric Voegelin, with his Platonic notion of radical transcendence.

Postmodernist multiculturalism, in contrast, calls attention to the pervasiveness and inevitability of diversity. Since it does not recognize universality, it must resign itself to the impossibility of any real harmony between human beings. Even individuals from the same cultural group are, though superficially alike and connected, separated by personal background and therefore ultimately isolated and alone. Multiculturalism of this kind drowns in a welter of differences and change, incapable of distinguishing between fruitful and destructive diversity, between legitimate and illegitimate self-assertion, between personal creativity and mere idiosyncrasy. Within this outlook, the word humanism is ultimately meaningless, as is the word culture. Because it rejects every notion of universality, postmodernist multiculturalism excludes the possibility of a more than superficial and transitory sense of common purpose and togetherness. It can offer no robust and lasting counterweight to social dissolution or arbitrary power.

But these two extreme positions, ahistorical universalism and “historicist” particularism, do not exhaust the possibilities in thinking about the relationship between universality and particularity. Differently understood, universality and particularity need not be incongruous. They can be shown to be in a sense intimately related, even mutually dependent. In the light of this understanding of universality and particularity, humanism and multiculturalism are seen to be not only compatible but to be different aspects of one and the same effort to realize life’s higher potential. Diversity need not be a threat to unity; it can, as unified by humanistic discipline, enrich and enhance the common. This idea has vast implications—not merely for scholars concerned about philosophical precision. Philosophy at its best is about concrete life and exists for the sake of life. That universality and particularity might be reconciled, and with them humanism and multiculturalism, has far-reaching practical significance. On the possibility of such reconciliation may rest the hope for averting conflict among societies and cultures in the twenty-first century. The possibility of synthesis between particularity and universality bespeaks a potential for creative rapprochement among diverse individuals, societies, and cultures—not at the expense of their diversity but rather through their diversity.

Establishing that universality and particularity may exist in union as well as in tension will require an extended discussion of difficult questions. Clarifying how they are related is here not an end in itself but intended to advance the overarching purpose of assessing whether in our shrinking world it may be possible for diverse nations and groups to have peaceful, indeed, morally and culturally enriching, relations. Keeping that purpose in mind will protect us from an overly technical approach to the fundamental philosophical issue.

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1. Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1919; with a new introduction by Claes G. Ryn, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1991), lxxiii (emphasis in original). Babbitt was professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard. His other books include Democracy and Leadership (1924) and Literature and the American College (1908). He was the founder and chief advocate of what has been called American Humanism or the New Humanism. A scholarsage with a deep interest in Eastern thought, Babbitt strongly influenced many Asian students, some of whom became prominent in their own countries. Chinese students of his contributed to the periodical Xueheng (Critical Review). The movement they started is today receiving new interest.

CHAPTER TWO

Moral and Cultural Preconditions of Harmony

No serious examination of the questions of peace and creative rapprochement can avoid their moral dimension. The fact that political, economic, and other social circumstances strongly influence human behavior does not excuse us from considering the character of individuals as a source of conduct. To understand the origins of the sort of conduct that reduces rather than increases the danger of conflict and understand how society might assist in fostering such behavior we must examine man’s basic moral predicament. Our frame of reference in trying to determine the terms of moral existence will be the evidence offered by our own experience, as augmented and elucidated by the historical experience of mankind.

By attending to the moral requirements of peace we shall, at the same time, advance the discussion of universality and particularity. In its most fundamental aspect, universality is a moral force, a force on which even truth and beauty ultimately depend because they cannot in the end do without the centering of the personality made possible by moral will. Universality in general can be seen as the power that orders the diversity of groups, individuals, and desires so as to make them part of the higher human life. Though radically incompatible with some manifestations of particularity, universality is potentially consonant with other manifestations. It can blend with and shape diversity, making diversity the medium for its own higher unity. Universality brings concrete and specific good into the world by embodying itself in particularity, giving such particularity a special dignity, raising it above inchoate individuality, and forming the antithesis of individuality organized for evil purposes. Humanism may in this context be broadly defined as the deliberate effort to understand and foster that higher development. Its task is to balance and harmonize unity and diversity and thereby to enrich the personal and the common life.

Many people in the West, and perhaps especially in the United States, rely on facile prescriptions for how to keep a multicultural mankind at peace. These prescriptions include closer economic ties, more technocratic enlightenment, more liberal tolerance, more international institutions, more free markets, and more democracy. Sometimes proponents of these measures exhibit a sentimental and naive “brotherhood of man” and assume that despite the differences among peoples and individuals all human beings are, deep down, the same and really only waiting to embrace. Not all of the mentioned formulas lack utility, and they are advanced with varying degrees of naïveté or realism, but, as ordinarily presented, they avoid what may be the very heart of the problem. They do not, except in a cursory manner, raise the moral and cultural preconditions of peace. They do not provide what seems most needed: a sturdy check on the human propensity to dominate and exploit others and a well-grounded respect for the attainments and legitimate claims of others.

Nationalistic arrogance and economic ruthlessness endanger international harmony in a direct, palpable manner. But these are only particularly troublesome instances of a more general threat to good relations among cultures, namely that, instead of interacting on the level of what is morally, aesthetically, and intellectually noblest in each, cultures encounter each other on the level of the mercenary, the grasping, the crude, the vulgar, and the shoddy. Whatever momentary benefits may be derived from such interaction, it does not form a basis for peace. Much of the popular Western culture that is absorbed by non-Western societies today creates a superficial commonality across borders, but it does not elicit among discerning elites the respect that might forge ties of lasting friendship. Cultures coming into closer contact while displaying their least-admirable traits may in time recoil from each other, a reaction that is bound to be exploited by opportunists on all sides, who are looking for excuses to exercise their will to power.

Here we must face the central problem that all societies and all persons are torn between their own higher and lower potentialities. This view of human nature is common to a large number of traditional philosophies, ethical systems, and religions, ranging from ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and Christianity to Sufi philosophy, Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Islam. The obstacles to realizing the values of goodness, truth, and beauty and to achieving peaceful relations among individuals and groups are ubiquitous. Historical and social circumstances may aggravate the problem, but its most fundamental cause is that human beings tend to shrink from the necessary effort, prone as they are to less-commendable desires. Progress requires protracted exertions. To the extent that a people falls short of what is best in its own culture, its members will exhibit such examples of self-indulgence as greed and intolerance. This will not only threaten its own social cohesion, but will also inevitably undermine international harmony.

The view of human nature and society just alluded to was until the last century or two wholly dominant in the Western world. It is similar to beliefs long influential in the East. A central feature of the traditional Western understanding of the human condition is the mentioned belief that human nature is in constant tension between desires that will enhance and complete existence and ones that, though they may bring short-term satisfaction, are destructive of a deeper harmony of life. To realize the higher meaning of life—what the Greeks called eudaimonia (happiness)—the individual needs to discipline his appetites of the moment, even try to extinguish some of them, with a view to his own enduring good. By happiness was meant not a collection of pleasures, but a special sense of well-being and self-respect that comes from living responsibly and nobly, as befits a truly human being. The person aspiring to that kind of life must frequently say no to pleasures and advantages of the moment, namely those that are inimical to a more deeply satisfying existence. Once attained, the life of happiness is its own reward. Aristotle emphasized the need for acquiring early in life the kind of habits that will enable the person to resist destructive desires and develop the soundness of character that orients the personality toward happiness. To grow as a human being the individual must live in association with others. A good society will supply the varied needs of a safe and comfortable existence, but most important, it will help civilize and humanize the person. Though family, groups, and social institutions can assist the person in achieving a happy life, no amount of external guidance or encouragement can substitute for individual effort.

The good life has many aspects and prerequisites—economic, political, intellectual, aesthetical, and moral—but there was widespread agreement in old Western society, whether predominantly Greek, Roman, or Christian, that the orientation of character, specifically, the quality of a person’s will, is crucial to realizing life’s higher potential. A person who lacks the moral strength required for right conduct cannot secure happiness by dint of intellectual brilliance, imaginative power, or economic productivity. Christianity has regarded man’s cleft will, his often desiring what is contrary to his own higher good, as the crux of human life. Though the individual should always strive to contain his selfish and shortsighted inclinations and try to act responsibly, his human weakness makes him heavily dependent on God. Protestant Christianity has been especially concerned to emphasize that even the best of men are unable to overcome their sinful inclinations on their own and need to be rescued by divine grace.

Western tradition, then, has, for the most part, regarded moral character and the performance of good actions as the primary measure of human goodness. The moral and religious wisdom of the West has explained and encouraged the kind of working on self that in time will build real meaning and worth into human existence. Whether the aim has been achieving the happiness and nobility of a worldly, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One. Peace as the Union of Universality and Particularity
• Chapter Two. Moral and Cultural Preconditions of Harmony
• Chapter Three. A Cosmopolitan Basis for Peace
• Chapter Four. The Living Past
• Chapter Five. A Common Ethical Center
• Chapter Six. Dubious Conceptions of Unity
• Chapter Seven. The Attack on History
• Chapter Eight. Value-Centered Historicism
• Chapter Nine. The Concrete as Normative
• Chapter Ten. The Unique Expression of the Universal
• Appendix
• Index
• About the Author